3 December 2020 June Jordan In the process of telling the truth about what you feel or what you see, each of us has to get in touch with himself or herself in a really deep, serious way.
3 December 2020 June Jordan That attitude that fighting is probably not fair, but you have to defend yourself anyway and damage the enemy, has been profoundly consequential as far as my political activism goes.
3 December 2020 June Jordan I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.
3 December 2020 June Jordan So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.
3 December 2020 June Jordan To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that’s political, in its most profound way.
3 December 2020 June Jordan The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.
3 December 2020 June Jordan There are two ways to worry words. One is hoping for the greatest possible beauty in what is created. The other is to tell the truth.
3 December 2020 June Jordan The courts cannot garnish a father’s salary, nor freeze his account, nor seize his property on behalf of his children, in our society. Apparently this is because a kid is not a car or a couch or a boat.
3 December 2020 June Jordan But, based on my friendship with Evie as young mothers, I started going on freedom rides in 1966.
